The End of July

Walking Pre’s trail at the end of July, and it is too early to sense summer’s end, but that is the feel of the afternoon: the sort of high bright day that cannot sustain its light and heat and cools into slow decline, the long low shadows pooling at my heels with every step. When the sun begins to orange, casting shafts of failing light through the crooked branches of oak and willow, there is a terrible melancholic pang, the moment unendurable in the imminence of its absence. There will be more summer afternoons, but none quite like this again; soon, the evenings will become briefer and cooler, the grass will brittle until it is crushed underfoot, the leaves will yellow and curl in anticipation of Fall, and this time will be gone. My whole life I’ve longed for something better than what can be, an infinity of rising summer, the days endlessly getting longer, so that in the glory of some sunblessed afternoon all my burdens would lift all at once. There is no such day coming. And if I can’t suffer the Summer, how then the long dark Winter?

It is time to leave the town where I was born. The past is close and stifling; nothing here suffices. Here I will strive and dream until I’ve been starved to nothing, until me and my shadow are indistinguishable even in as golden and lovely a sunset as this one. And then, when the sun goes down, I’ll disappear.

New GOOD Piece: A Lesson in Fortitude

My newest piece for GOOD Online, "A Lesson in Fortitude," is here:

Rail-thin, he walked slowly with almost comic intentionality, as if placing his feet in invisible foot-sized squares. He wore hipster glasses that gave him an air of intellectual superiority, and he spoke with such sarcasm that no student dared to oppose anything he said.

At Eleven, I was a Better Writer

It's pretty amazing, but I recently found this piece I wrote about my Grandpa Thorold when I was eleven years old-- the first assignment of sixth grade (the date is there). And I have to say-- my voice is the same, the retrospection the same (I was only about five at the time), the tendency to observe and the type of description the same, the rhythm of the prose the same. Um, why did I go to graduate school?




I mean, look at my concern, as always, with what memory can do and can't, with accuracy and how time changes things, with retold story:

Leo wants to play foosball in the basement and I don’t want to go to the basement, to the dank bottom below the stairs where the foosball table sits lonely and sad, so I say, “What about the river?”

Leo likes the river. He blinks his raccoon eyes and lights a cigarette and takes up his guitar and with it slung over his shoulder like a scabbard we start along the queue of trailers, the sun beating down in hard solid hot sheets, the train beating staccato clacks as the cars pass, one after another, beneath the overpasses where cars flash by as beads of color on the black string of road.

In the hollow beneath an overpass a girl in jean cut-offs and a wifebeater slips from the shadows, plants herself in our path with her hands on her hips. She is all low, sharp angles, a hard chin and triangle of hips and elbows. Her great sad eyes take her face; tattooed on her neck is a sad-eyed girl who I realize is herself, only with a gentler look. “Mikhael,” she says, and I realize it’s Quinn, Yoni, Vladena—whichever name for my Belorussian singer-songwriter ex is possible. She is angry for the way I left her, which was unconscionable—I put her on a plane for a trip to New York, collected my things from her house and left my key, and told her I was gone for good.

“Have you met Leo? He plays good music. And he smokes,” I say.

Leo offers her a cigarette and a light and she takes it, begrudgingly, lights it herself as Leo swings his guitar about the front and says, “You like Rock and Roll?”

She glowers, and I remember the morning I knew I had to leave, as she stood there naked in the dirty light of morning, chest heaving with tears, with the footlong sushi knife pressed to the tender flesh of her throat as she said, “You don’t think I’ll do it!”

I took a step toward her, and she lifts the knife toward me again as she lifts her cigarette now and then Leo comes down into the heart of the song, how Mary’s been down in the doldrums now for a decade and thirty two days and I’ve been down so long it seems that they threw all the numbers away, and she starts nodding with it a little despite herself, takes a long hard pull on the cigarette and throws it aside as she nods to the chorus, yeah, okay, she hears it now, and when Leo comes back in she sings harmony with him, do you like rock and roll? Well she sure likes rock and roll, and they’re perfect together, those two broken, cracking voices singing softly at the gates of heaven.

When they’re finished it all ok, forgiven even, and I look at the tattoo of the kind-faced Vladena on Vladena’s neck and the expressions match now and so Leo shoulders his guitar and Vladena joins us with her fierce long strides and we walk out from the shadows of the overpass and the train is gone and so we cross the lane of tracks and here now is the path through the grass and tall, overhanging trees toward the shifting silver sheet of river.

And then from behind a tree now is my recent ex, Whitney, who I somehow knew would be here because she loves this shaded spot that is most like the Redwood forest out the back of her college, and she says “Hey there, the party!,” and there is a joke implied that I do not get, and she has bobbed her blonde hair pixie-short and her voice is strange, I don’t even recognize it in this register and pitch, and it drives home that I haven’t spoken to her in six months and I do not want to now. But Leo is being friendly, and swings his guitar around and asks her if she’d like a song, and because I want to include Vladena I say, “You both like Leonard Cohen,” because that was always Vlad’s best song, and they both seem to know it can only be Hallelujah. They begin and it’s all minor fall and major riff to the fush of river, and we’ve all been here before, and Whit is swaying and her eyes are closed and she’s singing too, it’s a cold and broken hallelujah, and every breath they drew made the music more perfect, and Whit finally looks like she’s happy there giving her voice to the song, that pinched, anxious look gone from her face now for good. She is better now-- better without me.

I stand watching them sing, and I wish I could carry a tune or hit a true note. And because I can’t, I turn and leave them there singing, and run for the river and dive in, find the water clear and breathtakingly cold, and I don’t fight the current, go with it, the strains of song still reaching me, buoying me as I stroke for the the far bank where I can make out beneath the blinding sun the vague shape of a high silver tower rising toward the sky in a flurry of parapets and balconies.



I wake. My back is stuck to the sheets, and out the windows the birds are calling the sun from the warm dark. Hallelujah, I whisper. Hallelujah. As if I could so easily forgive and be forgiven, and there was any river to ford, any fresh, distant height to seek. As if I knew how to leave the past even in a dream.

Newest GOOD Piece

My essay "Thank You For Everything," just went live at GOOD.

Done Again

So after being finished for eight months, I decided my novel wasn't finished, attempted to resurrect my romance, imagining that:

1. Interracial love might make my novel salable.
2. Sex might make my novel salable.
3. The flaws and haziness of what I was trying to get, how and why in the material might magically have disappeared since last time I cut this material.
4. That through sheer persistence, I might make the damn thing work.

I also did a sort of Hemingway-esque (as in, In Our Time) interpolation of italicized, lyric passages, vignettes and scenes I cut for their failure to achieve any direct purpose. In other words, in a very un-Hemingwayesque fashion, I rebirthed all my darlings.

And I did go back through a chapter where the teacher gets established in the Delta, and did a lot of work trying allow just enough entry into character. Kato is shifty, and the book is finally only about him in relation to the children (and the children themselves), but there were things that needed to be established. In that way that Nick is present and not present in Gatsby, his sustained focus on Gatsby there in part because of himself and his desire to understand, to arrive at the flat bottom of narrative, Kato needed to be allowed to present just enough to be-- well, there. Because so much was now up in the air, I felt the freedom to seriously alter the second chapter, to move and cut and refigure.

Now, of course, I've seen that there can be no Reverend's daughter and no interracial love affair-tragedy-digression. My friend J.T. pointed out that I had, in the sex scene I really wrote the hell out of, engaged in perhaps the most egregious instance of pathetic fallacy known to man. "I don't know why on this night they suddenly decide to have sex," he said. "The only answer I can see is the rain. The rain makes them do it. The rain becomes them doing it. There's a lot of energy here in the rain."

When someone is that right, it hurts. His similar point about how show-offish and unnecessary the italicized vignettes also, sadly, was also correct. Goodbye again, my babies. Who could have known that the line "a virgin, unsullied country, the magnificient dream of God before the nightmare of man," was a tad overwrought?

Yet these two weeks of abandoned writing wasn't for nothing. Because at the point where I was able to imagine the novel as being unfinished, in process again, I did make my second chapter work in a way that well may stick. What I had was clean, but not lapidary in the way that the rest is. Now, though it may take more weeks to really know, I think it's right. Which means, finished yet again, I still have no agent, no contacts. But I have a fantastic sex scene based in and on the intrinsic attractiveness of rain. Talk about signs you've been in Eugene, Oregon too long.

As to Devotion

Outside, a loud windswept afternoon, the leaves of the overhanging oaks swaying in too much light, too hard and steady a brightness. I have spent all year longing for sun, and now can’t bear its arrival, huddle here in the shadowed café listening to accordion jazz sung in another language—French?—German?—coat buttoned against the chill blast of air-conditioning, and I don’t know what I’m doing at all, here, here. In this café at the glory of day, in this town where I was born and have lived now for six years, six long years, from all the innocence and hope of my early twenties all the way now to thirty, allegedly writing a novel, supporting myself teaching, making supposedly something substantial of words and air and ambition.

I am not so sure of this enterprise, am beginning to doubt it’s solvency, it’s saliency: life or art or either, I have in these last years gained the right to call myself a 'writer'. By that I mean less the pretentious WRITER writ large, and more that I have, through sustained pursuit, gone down that rabbit hole and run all my promise and effort into making something of words, to crafting narrative that is meant to mean something substantial, something significant. And yes, I can point to two dozen, perhaps three dozen published pieces, in commercial and literary magazines, newspapers, e-zines, anthologies, all the minor successes that offer support, encouragement, the satisfaction of payment and visibility. I am not unaccomplished as a writer. But I am far from where I want to be.

No, what I mean by solvency and saliency is: so what? In these years of work, the finally daily of work and teaching has left me with words, most of which I have discarded, and some of which have been looked at by others, examined for entertainment or temporary uplift or occasionally, intemperate anger, a sense of betrayal or in a few cases, a judgment that I had said nothing at all. I made a white supremacist angry enough to call me up and threaten me. I made a lawyer in educational policy angry enough to write and insist I had erred on the side of evil. I have an ex-girlfriend who will no longer speak to me for what she felt was a simultaneous misportrayal and overexposure. And of course, I have on occasion delighted or moved a person or twenty. But it was never meant to be for them, or about them—my friends, family, audience. It was about the need to say something important.

And it’s here that I find my life lacking. I write because I must; I need to speak from here, like this, because it is all I’ve ever known how to do. If I could quit, I would—I’d make some money, be able to afford a less threadbare jacket and pair of jeans, a second pair of boots, an apartment with an unstained couch and a bathroom bigger than a closet and a dvd player that works and an actual stereo and ipod and perhaps even a car that I can trust to take me beyond the city limits. I have unsurprisingly conflated art and life, lived so austerely in pursuit of pure and absolute expression that devotion has undone me. Last week, sitting with a beautiful woman at a bar who hardly knows me, I made some comment about wasting my life.

“You make your choices,” she said.

“How so?” I was curious about what she thought. I’d met her playing pool, and we’d found ourselves connected by the neat bind of narrative, our recent exes a former, messy affair, though we’d never before spoken. She interested me, had a way about her of seeming to intuit essence from the inscrutable clamor of what was before her—she’d surprised me in the accuracy of what she’d had to say about my ex, her observations little like the easy contempt I’d expected from a woman who’d been wronged.

She put her hand to my arm, the one holding the bourbon. “You spend your money on booze—you drink more than you should.”

This was in itself surprising—not the idea that I was at the bar frequent late evenings, which everyone knew, but the idea of that being vice or excess. Most people were convinced I drank water out, that there was no indulgence at all in it: I always keep it together. And it is true too that I long ago gave up trying to reach some gorgeous, liquored height, a flight that always ends at the bottom. I don’t drink like that, but I know what it is to want to. I'd stay out of the bars entirely, but sitting in my tight, dim apartment watching reality television past dark, the city spread beneath me in a circuit of lights, I often want more from the beckoning night. And so, the real question. “Why do I drink too much?”

She leaned in, whispered in my ear, “Because you’re lonely.”

It wasn’t meant as a come on, and I didn’t take it like that. But as an observation, it is both obvious and profound. It is a cliché, the lonely writer who drinks too much to drown his sorrows, who spins out his evenings shooting billiards and keeping his cards so close to his chest that even he doesn’t know what he’s holding or what the cards portend—cards that can only be played for augury and transcendence in some still unwritten scene, some book that one day will arrive in a box at a publisher’s door and open the way to some other passing glory and recognition that too will be insufficient. I am not a cliché, but I run the risk of becoming one living this way, writing this book and living so hungry and isolated.

I would like to say that I will close my computer and venture into the day outside, beyond the foyer windows where the sun is striking diamonds off the hoods of passing cars, and the light through the leaves in overlap and gap is a great green pane of stained glass. I would like to be bound somewhere with purposeful strides, to walk through so much light and heat to a clear destination, a meaningful end, to have a richer, easier life. But like the lady said, I make my choices according to what I can and know how to do. And so I’ll have another cup of coffee, roll back the sleeves of jacket, and try to write something less self-indulgent, something necessary and important. After all, the sun will go down, and the stars will come out, and by then the glittering lights of the city will beckon again. And I’d like to be able to say that I already answered.

Summertime

And a long time coming.

And after so long, it's better, still, if a bit melancholy and slow, a lull into heat: sunlight kissing a shoulder, a bright sweetness to the air, a finally just yes god please.

Hello, July.